Explanation: What alien planet's bizarre landscape
lurks below these fiery-looking clouds?
It's only planet Earth,
of course ... as seen on the
Water Vapor Channel.
Hourly, images like
this one (an infrared image shown in false-color)
are brought to you by the orbiting
Geostationary Operational
Environmental Satellites'
(GOES)
multi-channel
imagers.
These instruments can produce images at the
infrared wavelength of 6.7 microns or about 10 times the
wavelength of visible light, recording radiation absorbed by
water vapor in the upper
troposphere.
In this picture,
the
planet's dark regions correspond
to high concentrations of
water vapor
over storms and high cloud tops,
while bright areas are relatively dry.
The dominant bright feature seen here is a persistent
region of dry descending air extending west
into the Pacific
off the Peruvian coast.
Atmospheric water
vapor is otherwise invisible to the eye
and produced by evaporation from the
oceans.

Editor's note: Thanks to Don Garlick (Humboldt State
Univ.) for corrections to the original text.